1.
TO TELL THE TRUTH, I DON’T THINK LIZZIE WOULD EVER HAVE
told us her elephant story at all, if Karl had not been
called Karl.
Maybe I’d better explain.
I’m a nurse. I was working part-time in an old
people’s nursing home just down the road from where
we live. It was part-time because I wanted to be
home for Karl, my nine-year-old son. There were just the
two of us, so I needed to be there to see him off to
school, and be there for him when he got back. But
sometimes, at weekends, they asked me to do overtime.
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I couldn’t always say no – we all of us had to take our
turn to do weekend duties – and if I’m honest, the
money helped. So at weekends, if Karl hadn’t got
anywhere else to go, or anyone else to look after him,
they let me bring him into work with me.
I was a bit worried about it at first – whether anyone
would mind, how he’d get on with all the old folks – but
he loved it, and as it turned out, so did they. For a start, he
had the whole park to play around in. Sometimes he’d
bring a few friends. They could climb the trees, kick a
football about, whizz around on their mountain bikes. As
for the old folk, the children’s visits became quite a feature
of their weekends, something for them to look forward to.
They would gather around the sitting-room windows to
watch them, often for hours on end. And when it was
raining, Karl and his friends used to come inside and play
chess with them, or watch a film on the television.
Then, just a couple of weeks ago, on the Friday
night, it snowed, and snowed hard. I had to go to work
at the nursing home the next day – I was on morning
shifts that weekend – and so Karl had to come too. But
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he didn’t mind, not one bit. He brought half a dozen
of his friends along with him. They were going
tobogganing in the park, they said. They didn’t have
a toboggan between them. They simply brought along
anything that would slide – plastic sacks, surfboards,
even a rubber ring. As it turned out, bottoms worked
just as well as anything else. The nursing home was loud
with laughter that morning as the old folks watched
them gallivanting out there in the snow. In time, the
tobogganing degenerated into a snowball fight, which
the old folks seemed to be enjoying as much as Karl and
his friends were. I was busy most of the morning, but
the last time I looked out of the window I saw that,
much to everyone’s delight, Karl and his friends were
busy building a giant snowman right outside the
sitting-room window.
So I was taken completely by surprise when I walked
into Lizzie’s room a few minutes later and found Karl
sitting there at her bedside in his hat and his coat, the
two of them chatting away like old friends.
“Ah, so there you are,” Lizzie said, beckoning me in.
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“You did not tell me you had a son. And he is called
Karl! I can hardly believe it. And he looks like him too.
The likeness, it is extraordinary, amazing. I have told him
also about the elephant in the garden, and he believes
me.” She wagged her finger at me. “You do not believe
me. I know this. No one in this place believes me, but
Karl does.”
I hustled Karl out of the room, and away down the
corridor, ticking him off soundly for wandering into
Lizzie’s room like that, uninvited. Thinking back, I suppose
I shouldn’t have been surprised. Karl was always wandering
off. What did surprise me, though, was how furious he
was with me.
“She was just going to tell me about her elephant,” he
protested loudly, tugging at my hand, trying to break away
from me.
“There isn’t any elephant, Karl,” I told him. “She
imagines things. Old people often do that. They get a bit
mixed-up in the head sometimes, that’s all. Now come
along, for goodness’ sake.”
It wasn’t until we were back home that afternoon that
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I had a chance to sit Karl down and explain all about
Lizzie, and her elephant story. I told him I knew from her
records that Lizzie was eighty-two years old. She had been
in the nursing home for nearly a month, so we had got to
know one another’s little ways quite well already. She
could be a little prickly, and even cantankerous with the
other nurses sometimes. But with me, I said, she was
considerate and polite, and quite co-operative – well,
mostly. Even with me, though, she could become rather
obstinate from time to time, especially when it came to
eating the food that I put in front of her. She wouldn’t
drink enough either, no matter how much I tried to
encourage her.
Karl kept asking me more and more questions about
her. “How long has she been in the nursing home?”
“What’s the matter with her?” “Why’s she in bed in her
room, and not with the others?” He wanted to know
everything, so I told him everything…
…how she and I had taken a particular shine to one
another, how she was very direct, to the point of
bluntness sometimes, and how I liked that. She’d told me
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once, on the very first day she came into the nursing
home, “I might as well be honest with you. I do not like
being in here, not one bit. But since I am, and since we
shall be seeing rather a lot of one another, then you may
call me Lizzie.”
So that’s what I did. To all the other nurses she was
Elizabeth, but to me she was Lizzie. She slept a lot,
listened to the radio, and she read books, lots of books.
She didn’t like to be interrupted when she was reading,
even when I had to give her some medication. She
especially loved detective stories. She told me once, rather
proudly, that she had read every book that Agatha Christie
had ever written.
The doctor, I told Karl, thought she couldn’t have
eaten properly for weeks, maybe months, before she
came in. And that’s certainly what she looked like when
I first saw her, so shrivelled and weak and vulnerable,
her skin pale and paper-thin over her cheekbones, her
hair creamy white against the pillows. Yet even then I
could see there was something very unusual, very
spirited about her – the steely look in her eye, the
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sudden smile that lit up her whole face. I knew nothing
of her life – no relatives came to see her. She seemed to
be entirely alone in the world.
“She’s a bit like Gran,” I told Karl, trying to explain
her state of mind to him as best I could. “You know, like
a lot of old people, a bit muddled and forgetful – like when
she starts up about her elephant. She’s goes on about it
all the time, not just to me, to everyone. ‘There was an
elephant in the garden, you know,’ she says. It’s all
nonsense, Karl, I promise you.”
“You don’t know,” Karl said, still angry at me. “And
anyway, I don’t care what you say. I think it’s true what
she told me about the elephant. She’s not fibbing, she’s
not making it up, I know she isn’t. I can tell.”
“How can you tell?” I asked him.
“Because I tell fibs sometimes, so I can always tell
when someone else is, and she’s not. And she’s not
muddled either, like Gran is. If she says she had an
elephant in her garden, then she did.”
I didn’t want to argue, didn’t want to make him any
more cross with me than he already was, so I said
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nothing. But I lay awake that night wondering if Karl could
possibly be right. The more I thought about it, the more
I began to think that maybe there was a ring of truth about
Lizzie’s elephant.
The next morning at work, with Karl and his friends
cavorting about in the snow, I was sorely tempted to go
in and ask Lizzie about her elephant, but it never seemed
to be the right moment. It was best not to probe, not to
intrude, I thought. She always seemed to me to be a very
private person, happy enough in her own silence. We had
got used to one another, and I think both of us felt
comfortable together. I didn’t want to spoil that. As I went
into her room I decided that if she brought up the
elephant again, then I would ask her. But she never did.
She asked about Karl though. She wanted to know all
about him. She particularly wanted to know when he
would be coming in again to see her. She said she had
something very unusual, very special to show him. She
seemed very excited about it, but told me not to tell him.
She wanted it to be a surprise, she said.
I noticed then she hadn’t drunk anything again
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from her glass of water, and told her off gently, which
she was quite used to by now. I walked past the end of
the bed to close her window, tutting at her reproachfully.
“Lizzie, you are so naughty about your water,” I told her.
But I could tell she wasn’t listening to me at all.
“Do you mind leaving the window open, dear?” she
said. “I like the cold. I like to feel the fresh air on my face.
It cools me. This place is rather overheated. I think it is a
dreadful waste of money.” I did as she asked, and she
thanked me – her manners were always meticulous. She
was gazing out of the window now at the children. “Your
little Karl, he loves the snow, I think. I look at him out
there, and I see my brother. It was snowing that day
too…” She paused, then went on. “On the radio this
morning, dear, I thought I heard them say that it is
February the thirteenth today. Did I hear right?”
I checked my mobile phone to confirm it.
“Will your little Karl come in to see me today, do you
think?” she asked again. She seemed to be quite anxious
about it. “I do hope so. I should like to show him… I think
he would be interested.”
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“I’m sure he will,” I told her. But I wasn’t sure at all. I
knew full well Karl wanted to find out more about her
elephant story, but it looked to me as if he was having
far too much fun in the snow outside. Lizzie said
nothing more about it, as I washed her, and then
arranged her pillows and made her comfortable again.
She loved me to take my time brushing her hair. It was
while I was doing this that there was a knock on the
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door. To my great relief, and to her obvious delight, it
was Karl. He came in breathless, and sat down at once
beside her, his face glowing, snow all over his coat,
still in his hair. She reached out, brushing it away, then
touching his cheek with the tips of her fingers. “Cold,”
she said. “It was cold on February the thirteenth, February
the thirteenth…” Her mind seemed to be wandering.
“Your elephant, the elephant in the garden. You were
going to tell me about your elephant, remember?” Karl
said.
That was when I noticed that Lizzie was becoming
quite tearful and upset. I thought perhaps Karl should
go. “He can come back later, another time,” I told her.
“No.” She was very insistent that we stayed, that
she wanted us to stay, that she had something she
needed to tell us.
So I pulled up another chair, and sat down beside
them. “What is it, Lizzie? Is there something about
February the thirteenth that’s especially important to
you?” I asked her.
She turned her head away from me, unable to
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control or disguise the tremor in her voice. “It was this
day that changed my life for ever,” she said. I reached
out and took her hand in mine. Her grip was weak, but
it was enough to let me know that she really did want us
to stay. She was looking out of the window, and
pointing now.
“Look, do you see? Do you hear? The wind is
blowing through the trees. The branches, they are
shaking. Are they frightened of the wind, do you think?
Little Karli said it that day, that the trees were frightened
of the wind, that they wanted to run away, but they
couldn’t. We could, he said, but they couldn’t. He was
very sad about it.” She smiled at Karl. “Karli was my little
brother, and you remind me so much of him. And this
makes me happy, that you are here, I mean; and on this
day too, so that I can tell you my story, our story, Karli’s
story and mine. But it makes me sad also. On February
the thirteenth I am always sad. The wind in the trees, it
makes me remember.”
I had noticed before that she spoke English in a
strange way, pronouncing her words carefully, too
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correctly, and in proper sentences. Her name might have
been English, but I had always thought she might be
Dutch, or Scandinavian, or German perhaps. “It was a
hot wind, a scalding wind,” she went on. “I do not
believe in hell, nor heaven come to that. But if you can
imagine it, it was like a wind from the fires of hell. I
thought we would burn alive, all of us.”
“But you said it was in February,” Karl interrupted. I
frowned at him, but Lizzie didn’t seem to mind at all.
“That’s in wintertime, isn’t it?” Karl went on. “I mean,
where were you living? Africa or somewhere?”
“No. It wasn’t in Africa. Didn’t I tell you this before?
I think I did.” She was suddenly looking a little unsure of
herself. “There was an elephant in the garden, you see.
No, honestly there was. And she liked potatoes, lots of
potatoes.” I think my wry smile must have betrayed me.
“You still do not believe me, do you? Well, I cannot say
that I blame you. I expect you and all the other nurses
think I am just a dotty old bat, a bit loopy, off my rocker,
as you say. It is quite true that my bits and pieces do not
work so well any more – which, I suppose, is why I am
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in here, isn’t it? My legs will not do what I tell them
sometimes, and even my heart does not beat like it
should. It skips and flutters. It makes up its own rhythm
as it goes along, which makes me feel dizzy, and this is
not at all convenient for me. But I can tell you for certain
and for sure, that my mind is as sound as a bell, sharp
as a razor. So when I say there was an elephant in the
garden, there really was. There is nothing wrong with
my memory, nothing at all.”
“I don’t think you’re batty at all,” said Karl. “Or
loopy.”
“That is very kind of you to say so, Karl. You and I
shall be good friends. But I have to admit that when I
come to think of it, I cannot remember much about
yesterday, nor even what I had for breakfast this
morning. But I promise you I can remember just how it
was when I was young. I remember the important
things, the things that matter. It is as if I wrote them
down in my mind, so that I should not forget. So I
remember very well – it was on the evening of my
sixteenth birthday – that I looked out of the window,
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and saw her. At first she just looked like a big dark
shadow, but then the shadow moved, and I looked
again. There was no doubt about it. She was an
elephant, quite definitely an elephant. I did not know it
at the time, of course, but this elephant in our garden
was going to change my life for ever, change all our lives
in my family. And you might say she was going to save
all our lives also.”
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